The HP Communities forums offer email subscriptions for threads you’ve participated in, or all posts for a specific message board. By default these emails only contain the subject of the post, along with a lot of other text you don’t care about. Here’s how to make those emails useful, by including the post content:

Everyone talks about how moving to Cloud-based services can reduce CapEx, and that you only “pay for what you need.” People seem to assume this is a Good Thing, and to my mind, it probably is. But many businesses are obsessed with reducing OpEx, not CapEx. In fact, they will use all manner of tricks to move expenditure to the CapEx bucket. Why is that, and what might it mean for “Pay as you go” models?

I’ve been reading more about OpenFlow recently, and something that was pointed out to me was that OpenFlow offers features that could give us deeper insights into our traffic flows, without necessarily modifying them. Whilst not being a full replacement for NetFlow/sFlow, it would be far better than just guessing at what an application is doing. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities.

How much monitoring should I do for services that I’ve outsourced? This question comes up frequently with my clients. They’ve paid someone else to manage a service for them, and they’re wondering if they should just leave all monitoring to the service provider. They’re paying for it, so why have a dog and bark yourself? This applies to all sorts of outsourcing agreements - it might be for a simple SaaS-based service, or it might be a complex network environment that you designed and built, and then handed over to a third party to manage.

Cisco made some announcements about SDN certifications at Cisco Live US, in June this year. These didn’t seem to get a lot of attention at the time, perhaps due to little detail being available. A few more things have started to come out, but it’s still not full released. What might these SDN certifications be like, and will they be in demand?